Bong Joon-ho is a world-renowned South Korean director. He has garnered international acclaim and he is nominated for an Academy Award for directing.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the famous director.
- Bong Joon-ho was born on September 14, 1969
- He is a South Korean film director and screenwriter
- He garnered international acclaim for his second feature film Memories of Murder (2003)
- Before achieving commercial success with his subsequent films The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013)
- Both of which are among the highest-grossing films of all time in South Korea
- Two of his films have screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival
- Okja, which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival
- And Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival
- He became the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or
- Parasite also won Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Golden Globe Awards
- With Bong nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay for his work
- Following the film’s nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, Parasite became the first South Korean film to receive an Academy Award nomination in any category
- For his work on the film, Bong received Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture
- In 2017, Metacritic ranked Bong sixteenth on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century
- His films feature social themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden mood shifts
- Bong Joon-ho was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1969
- He is the youngest of four children
- His father was a graphic and industrial graphic designer, art director of the National Film Production and professor Bong Sang-gyun
- He passed away in 2017
- While his mother was a full-time housewife
- But she was a second daughter of the renowned modern Korean author Park Taewon, Park Soyoung
- Bong’s maternal grandfather, Park Taewon, was an esteemed author during the Japanese colonial period, most famous for his work A Day in the Life of Gubo the Novelist and his defection to North Korea in 1950
- His older brother Bong Junsoo is an English professor at the Seoul National University
- And his older sister Bong Jihee is a fashion designer and director of the International Culture Association
- His wife is Jung Sunyoung
- And his son is a movie director Bong Hyomin
- While Bong was in elementary school, the family relocated to Seoul, taking up residence in Jamsil-dong by the Han River
- Bong enrolled in Yonsei University in 1988, majoring in sociology
- College campuses such as Yonsei’s were then hotbeds for the South Korean democracy movement
- And Bong was an active participant of student demonstrations
- Frequently subjected to tear gas early in his college years
- Bong served a two-year term in the military in accordance with South Korea’s compulsory military service before returning to college in 1992
- He co-founded a film club named Yellow Door with students from neighboring universities
- As a member of the club, Bong made his first films
- Including a stop-motion short titled Looking for Paradise and a 16mm short titled White Man
- He graduated from Yonsei University in 1995
- In the early 1990s, Bong completed a two-year program at the Korean Academy of Film Arts
- While there, he made many 16mm short films
- His graduation films Memory Within the Frame and Incoherence were invited to screen at the Vancouver and Hong Kong international film festivals
- He also collaborated on several works with his classmates
- Most notably as cinematographer on the highly acclaimed short 2001 Imagine
- Directed by his friend Jang Joon-hwan
- Aside from cinematography on Hur Jae-young’s short A Hat, Bong was also lighting director on an early short Sounds From Heaven and Earth by Choi Equan, and The Love of a Grape Seed
- Parasite was released in South Korea by CJ Entertainment on 30 May 2019
- And in the rest of the world by Neon in late-2019
- It received widespread critical acclaim and earned $115 million at the worldwide box office
- Becoming Bong’s highest-grossing release
- For Parasite, Bong was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 77th Golden Globe Awards
- With the film itself winning Best Foreign Language Film
- After graduating, he spent the next five years contributing in various capacities to works by other directors
- He received a partial screenplay credit on the 1996 omnibus film Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better Than a Lover
- Both screenplay and assistant director credits on Park Ki-yong’s 1997 debut Motel Cactus
- And is one of four writers (along with Jang Joon-hwan) credited for the screenplay of Phantom the Submarine (1999)
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